Month: April 2012

You see, anytime someone comments on my blog, I get an e-mail notification. And my phone is synced up with my e-mail account.
So through the magic of technology, every time you post a comment on any of my posts, you make me vibrate.
The cool and really special part about this is that most of the time when I am at work, dealing hand after hand of poker and wishing I was doing something else, I will feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. And it snaps me out of my daydreaming and short-term misery and puts a smile on my face.

So think about that when you are commenting. Not only are you making Youngman Brown happy, but you are making the real me happy.

Imagine me at work with a giant frown on my face. As you click “Publish Comment,” just imagine that you are poking the real-life-me, letting me know that I have something to look forward to reading.

And my frown, as they say, turns upside down.

-Youngman Brown

Is that a vibrating phone (informing you that your blog followers
are engaged in your content) in your pocket, or are you just
happy to see me?

A little while back, I wrote a post about a gas station attendant who was too busy playing on his phone to do his job and fill my tank.

I imagined that his name was Shane Lazypunk.

The kid continued texting or tweeting or words-with-friends-ing or whatever the hell he was doing while another attendant from the other side of the gas station (who I called Kevin Doeshisjob) came over to do Shane’s job for him.

In my blogging rage, I made a fake Twitter account for him so that I could properly document what I thought he might be tweeting at the time.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you know that I used to be a professional poker player.

I was somewhat of a latecomer to the game, and when I started playing for a living in 2009, the poker boom had already been reverberating for years.

Yours truly.

While many people say the boom is still going strong, the main difference is that there aren’t many new players. Nowadays, the typical poker player has been playing for years and has experience – the one thing they were previously lacking. Sure, they made mistakes. But the mistakes weren’t nearly as atrocious as the ones they made in years past, and they didn’t make them as frequently.

As time went on, the skill gap continued to shrink, as did my edge. With the addition of the rake charged by the casinos, playing live poker wasn’t nearly as profitable as it had been.

So in 2011, I tried something different. I set a goal to achieve Supernova Elite on Pokerstars (an online poker site).

I don’t really want to get too technical, but essentially this would require me to earn 1,000,000 frequent player points in a calendar year. To do this, I would need to play just under 4 million hands of poker, which ended up being about 10,000 hands per day. This was online poker, so I was able to play on 24 games at the same time, having to make constant decisions. This resulted in long, stressful hours as well as incredibly large swings in wins and losses.